I am running your 7.0 version at the below website:

http://www.digitalprecisions.com/forum - http://www.digitalprecisions.com/forum

It's working wonderfully, and there's really only one thing I would like better control over, and that is the Private Messenger.  I would LOVE a way to be able to view Private Messages of other users.  I dont mean having a copy of every private message sent to the administrator either, as that could get to be a major headache and overload the database with thousands of messages flowing in.  However, it would be nice to view messages which have been sent to and from forum users somehow. 

I say this because I have had a few "bad apples" in the forum who are trying recruit my users for their own handicapping forums, essentially stealing my clients. Initially they were emailing all the other users to recruit them so I disabled the viewing of email addresses.  They then decided to use Private Messenger to recruit them.  I know you'll probably ask "why not ban them?", but as you know it's damn near impossible to ban dynamic IP addresses and they'll just keep on creating more anonymous email addresses on hotmail, juno, and yahoo, so banning their email addresses doesnt work either.

I can tell through the "statistics" page that there are hundreds of private messages flying about, but I cannot tell from whom, to whom, or what the messages are themselves. 

Another solution would be to not allow users without a minimum number of posts (50, 100, etc) use of Private Messenger.  Once they achieve a certain number of posts THEN Messenger would be enabled.  This may be a drastic option, but I am running out of ideas as how to weed out the bad users who are spreading their poison via Private Messenger on my forum.

Sincerely,

Benjamin (Blade)

Why not just turn off the Private Messager feature for a while, till the colprate gets board and moves away.

Also in version 7 you can ban email domains, when used in conjuction with email activation so that you can make it so that people using aol, yahoo, hotmail, etc. addresses can't use these email addresses when registering. 

Why are you using ver 7 on a live server.